Nostradamus, tr. and intro. Richard Sieburth

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Prophesy –– astrology –– verse –– clairvoyance –– sophism ­­–– eschatology –– apocalypticism –– magic –– obscurity ­­–– divination –– enigma ––opacity –– mysticism –– grotesqueries –– the mother of all ambiguity ­­–– vatic –– visionary –– violent. The avant-garde occult classic The Prophesies of Nostradamus has found its ideal translator in Richard Sieburth and Sieburth and Stéphane Gerson have provided superb introductions and notes. Nostradamus, the vicar of implausible audibles, has created an epic cut-up poem, in William Burroughs’s sense. As Sieburth puts it, this is a “bleakly Nietzschean (or, more precisely, Benjaminian) vision of the Eternal Return of the Same.” Prophesies is riddled with riot, predicting a panoply of possible futures while all the time registering the trauma of its historical moment and, against all odds, our own.

“A major poet for our time — & then some – Charles Bernstein has emerged as a principal voice –maybe the best we have – for an international avant-garde now in its second century of visions & revisions." – Jerome Rothenberg on The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein.

"A superb poet and great inventor of poetry, Charles Bernstein dazzlingly invents the essay for poetry: professing in a gorilla suit and white tuxedo.”—George Lakoff